MILWAUKEE — The new era of coffee has arrived in Milwaukee. Discourse Coffee is crafting up some of the fanciest cups of joe you have ever seen. In fact, they look like cocktails.
The cafe describes itself as an experimental coffee shop. Housed inside the Crossroads Collective at 2238 N Farwell Ave, Milwaukee, it is putting an elegant twist on coffee.
"We wanted to be a little performative and make the center piece the drink not just the atmosphere and the people," Sean Liu, the director of operations at Discourse Coffee, said.
The menu items sound more like expensive cocktails than your morning pick-me-up. For instance, the Motorhead consists of: espresso, pork fat & apple caramel, chai concentrate, root beer bitters, apple powder, and smoked sea salt. The What Winter Forgot has: espresso, honey chai, drinking chocolate, chipotle cacao bitters, ras el hanout, burnt orange, and atomized aroma of winter. This not your basic vanilla latte from Starbucks.
"We like to describe ourselves as a workshop because we like to add our own little twist on our drinks," Liu said.
There are seven featured coffee concoctions as well as more classic drinks like black coffee, espressos, and macchiatos. But even the black coffee isn't typical.
"So we sous vide coffee in hot water at night. We hold it at a constant temperature, and then when you get that result in the morning. It's very aromatic, and it almost tastes like a fine wine," Liu said.
It truly does have a wine-taste to it. I tried it.
The coffee shop originally started in Door County. After having some success up north, Discourse moved downstate to Milwaukee. It hosted various pop-up shops around town before finally opening at Crossroads Collective on Feb. 5.
Discourse Coffee hopes to expand people's coffee horizons and have them experience new flavors they never thought of before.
